Internetese as a Second Language

I was checking out the World of Warcraft Forum for Absolute Beginners, Welcome to WoW, because noobs are always chuckle-worthy. There’s a sticky post of WoW Lingo translations — you’ll know all of those — but I noticed that the most famous internet acronym of all isn’t included.

You know the one … W T F.

A gaming nubling would see WTF about 23,904 times per gaming session, they NEED to know what we’re screaming at them!

And that reminded me of a real life story.

Some family holiday, maybe was Thanksgiving, dunno, but my extended family was in full force … brother, sister, their spouses, children, their in-laws and their children … and we get to talking about the venacular of txt messaging and the internet. My sibling’s sister-in-law asked what “p-own” means. (Actually, “pwn”, but she had only heard it, never seen it in print.)

My nephew (level 62 druid on another server because I don’t want him witnessing any Uncle Foton hate in the general chat channels) and I started laughing and explained what pwning is and how much we, personally, pwn. We would have further explained how much we’d pwn her if she ever dared step inside Warcraft, but she asked about other acronyms and we answered. (Don’t worry, we didn’t give away all the internet secrets.)

Let me briefly pause to explain that this woman has been a thorn in my side since the day I met her. I barely acknowledge her existence, and she mine, ever since a family tussle that we now refer to as “That First Communion Incident”. Now, I never miss an opportunity to passive-aggressively torment her. And it’s remarkably easy to do.

Anyways, she started going on about gaming and how borderline satanic, evil it is (y’know, blow me) with its speaking in tongues and all, and then she fake apologized for asking all those questions.

“No prob”, said me, “as long as you don’t ask what W T F is.”

My nephew snorted soda out of his nose.

“W T F?” asked she. (Didn’t I just tell her not to ask?)

I leaned in conspiratorially, “What. The. Fuck.” and took my leave.

Asked and answered, baby, asked and answered.

I can hardly wait ’til she asks about “mofo”.

Azeroth Exposed

Intel and YouTube are sponsoring a video contest of the funniest moments in World of Warcraft. Submissions are accepted beginning March 1, 2007 through March 21, 2007; voting takes place April 1, 2007 through April 15, 2007; and the winner will be announced on April 26th. The winner will receive “… an unbelievable gaming rig powered by the new Intel® Coreâ„¢2 Extreme quad-core processor.” (Link to contest page)

Nice production values on the Intel teaser vid, UNFORTUNATELY, his name is spelled Nefarian, not Nefarion.

Common noob mistake, mrmintel, don’t beat yourself up over it.

(UPDATE: The embedded player may not appear at times thanks to the 8 million WoW locusts chewing up YouTube resources. The contest trailer can always be viewed on the contest page linked above.)

Please Don’t Feed the Stereotypes

This World of Warcraft thread got off to a great start, thanks to a quick-witted response by Tearing, level 9 posting-alt of the Firetree realm: Extreme misogyny in wow.

Anaksunamoun, level 5 shaman of the Cho’gall realm, wrote:

im a level 45 rogue and i have experienced more than 5 times in less than 4 mos of playing extreme misogyny and typecasting of female players. apparently there arent a lot of female rogues since “girls are usually mages or shamans”

(Emphasis mine.)

Reply #1, by Tearing:

move along, this is not an attention seeking thread, which would coincidentally fit right into any stereotypes

Harassment I can believe. Misogyny, not so much.